


the noise and the remnants

by handschuhmaus



Category: Machineries of Empire Series - Yoon Ha Lee
Genre: Gen, Identity Issues, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Reference to Suicidal Ideation, Set Between Ninefox Gambit and Raven Strategem, all of which are referred to in canon, mathematical references, ok to podfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-30
Updated: 2019-11-30
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:29:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21608341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/handschuhmaus/pseuds/handschuhmaus
Summary: Ajewan Cheris becomes Garach Jedao Shkan.or: the further integration of memories and feelings (which didn't actually go up with the carrion bomb) aboard the needlemoth.
Relationships: Ajewen Cheris & Garach Jedao Shkan
Comments: 3
Kudos: 14
Collections: 300bpm Flash Exchange November 2019





	the noise and the remnants

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flowersforgraves](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flowersforgraves/gifts).



> I was asked to use ["Static"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq9zwaZhuiM) by Jukebox the Ghost, as inspiration. Indeed, the motif of static shows up a couple times here, in the guise of noise on the radio waves, and then as a play in metaphor on static electricity. Some other themes in the song show up in slightly different forms as well.
> 
> ~~There may be a reference to Geordi LaForge, too.~~

There is time enough aboard the needlemoth to think and plan and prepare.

Cheris fixes a meal, not ceremonial, not fancy: rice, pickles, natto and seasonings, the sort she might have had alone in an apartment, and it's hard to eat it. Not because of the conviction in her mind that she has different hands that hold chopsticks just slightly differently. Not because the aftereffects of the carrion glass occasionally manifest like she absorbed a lexicon that colored the connotation of everyday objects like "pickles" with a dozen new colors, and it feels like learning to see with the broad-spectrum vision assistance device a Nirai wears in one of the dramas. And not, on that note, because this is not the sort of meal the Shuos in her head would have fixed for himself.

It's just that it's hard to eat when every mouthful causes a debate between the well-settled pragmatic side of you, and a self-destructive impulse you are still working to integrate into your sense of reality. Rice and pickles and soybeans are good, and if she's going to carry on this work (part of her is hotly convinced it is hers and has been for centuries, another part equally adamant that this is a strange and novel thing that goes against Kel principal besides) she needs her body and mind to function as well as possible. But _she's a Kel gun_ who did terrible things _that aren't even going to work!_ and she doesn't deserve food, deserves the not-oblivion of the black cradle, and the pain and--

* * *

Afterwards, washing up with soap that is the only option but reminds her uncomfortably of Khiaz and, perhaps, of Kujen (there are things that were either missed by the carrion glass, splintered too small for her to find, or blocked out by Jedao) she thinks about the calculus of one body (called friend, comrade in arms) for one equal one (called heretic, for disagreeing, for daring to defy the calendar, but no worse than some on "our side"), and finds herself in another argument, over wording, the weight of dozens of memories causing a physiological anxiety response to the mathematical term.

"I'm sorry," she _thinks in Jedao's voice_ , because that had become familiar. But she has to poke at, review, a memory evoked in her own head to make sense of it: there are two, no, three elementary calculus classes in her head, and the earliest one was ...Jedao's (and is Cheris's, now, like it or not), first experience with this severity of verbal castigation, on account of the dyscalculia he couldn't help.

She wonders why number theory, and abstract, didn't make him so scared, but beyond the suspicion that other instructors were less unkind doesn't come to an answer.

_But_ , she thinks (a compassion that is more like the aged mercenary fox, the farm kid who played with geese, at whom it is directed, than the mathematician Kel inculcated to battle), _it meant calculation. And there's marginal change (builds the integers), all the changes gathered up, all the rates--_

It is strange and yet refreshing to readily have that sort of compassion for one's self, and equally alien for Jedao, who could not seem to manage to turn his remote mercy onto the monster of Hellspin.

_There was no other way (for you) to telegraph a message._

(--and, Cheris thinks, there may not have been a way, at Hellspin, for even her to arrange a calendrical spike--the novel alteration of heptarchate to hexarchate by Kujen had demonstrated things about both systems that hadn't been known before, and she had a few centuries' additional puzzle pieces of mathematics. Not to say just anyone, even Nirai, could have worked it out and made these plans to do it--which plans necessitated Jedao the tactician--but aside from the aptitude and elements, you'd have to defy Vidona and Rahal, which would be paralyticly terrifying even as a crashhawk (yes) without the fox background Jedao lent her.)

But that gruesome arithmetic was the only ( _she is trying to justify an atrocity from centuries ago!_ ) possible message in that circumstance...

And because she is still Ajewan Cheris, the concept of messages recalls signal analysis, which she'd taken because she liked the teacher and it was relatively more useful to the Kel than most math, and she thinks, momentarily, how messy the series would be that replicated all this static in her head.

* * *

Jedao dreams, of ravens and geese, of geese cawing and wheeling like ravens, of a raven fiercely at his side like a goose, of a fluffy and slightly feral cow licking at the ashhawk insignia that was a ninefox the last time he dreamed this, of Mwennin phrases he never learned the meaning of, of broken Shparoi echoing over a barnyard. 

And dreams are meant to be the way the brain integrates things, but it is a completely novel challenge to have nearly a second life's worth of memories, plus the black cradle, in one's head, and the only thing this one, hazy as it was, clarifies is: she is Jedao, now (will be, for the course of this... not mission, but endeavor. Although, she is, as well, still Ajewan Cheris.)

That is a less strange sentence, although neither of them had felt the insistent desire to change forms or declare themselves an alt, after the experiences of resurrection from the black cradle, of new bodies and ...riding along in another's mind. 

Jedao is ...dead, but she is also the only one to know both the anchored existence of the black cradle, and the process of stuffing another being's existence into your head. Of being driven by curiosity and then galvanized by knowledge that shocked you into stillness.

But then--to carry on his purpose would take a crashhawk mathematician, as she's grudgingly accepted she is, and those don't come around so often. He's been a Kel weapon, and the Kel have formation instinct (blessing and curse with a mad-sane general (and how many operations take the two of his deuce of gears with itself to lucky-unlucky four?)), and the hexarchate has the Rahal, the Vidona, Nirai Kujen... 

_And_ it has enemies and rebels and a want for more mercy and choice. The lynchpins of her plan, a plan that must strike a balance between genius and mindful of humane respect, if it is to remain true to that centuries old purpose predating the hexarchate...

**Author's Note:**

> well. It seems there _is_ a Korean analogue to natto, which reinforces my idea to include it, but natto seemed very slightly less obscure to a western audience. (it's also not clear to me if they're used in exactly the same way.) And stylistically most food in Machineries of Empire seems to be given generic English-language descriptions, but I am not sure how to thusly describe natto without it a) sounding disgusting or technical or b) being sufficiently generic that it's confused with e.g. tempeh or even fermented black [soy]beans.
> 
> (and, yes, I have eaten natto despite not being of any Asian descent. I would not say I love it but I find it pleasant enough to eat occasionally.)


End file.
